It might be obvious, but people and search engines are a website’s most important visitors and most websites usually require both.
But have you done any web site optimization for either of them ?
For a web site to succeed it must tend to the needs of both the search engine and to people and that’s not easy, as they can both be looking for entirely different things.
Designing a website to cater to search engines is normally referred to as SEO or Search Engine Optimization and designing a web site for people is generally just referred to as web site design. Designing a web site to cater to both is generally referred to as web site optimization.
The task of web site optimization generally includes web page optimisation although web site optimization can be done without doing much by way of web page optimisation.
The main interests a search engine has in a web site can be summarized as:
- Internal linking structure & tags: How pages are linked and what pages are linked is very important to a search engine. Which pages are linked and the number of link to them tells a search engine how important that page is to the site. Additional ranking information can be provided to the search engine using plain text links rather than image links. A keyword phrase in the link text will give further clues as to what the topic of the page being linked to is about. Image alt tags and link title tags should also be used to convey more information to the search engine.
- Important things to avoid: Search engines do have penalties for infringing their guidelines usually such penalties involve a lowering of rankings, page de-indexing or in extreme cases complete banning of the entire site from the search engines index. All the major search engines do NOT like mininets, link farms, hidden page text, keyword stuffing and duplicate content on the same site. In addition Google does not like paid for links.
- Site & page coding: Search engines live to consume text and that’s their main interest. They can’t analyze text in graphic images and only Google can read text captions in Flash movies, all be it not very well. The html page coding for a page should be kept to a minimum and placed whenever possible below the text content. This makes the text content easy and quicker for the search engines to find.
- Page & site theme: Each page on a web site will have a theme that is determined by the use of key phrases in the page content and links to each page. The themes of individual pages and the way they are linked together will determine the theme of the site as a whole. A more consistent site theme leads to more consistently themed rankings with the search engines.
- Age of domain: The age of a domain name and how long it is currently registered for is important to Google especially for competitive keywords. These factors are however less important to MSN or Yahoo.
- Page title and description: Search engines expect a unique page title and a description that they could use in a search listing. Google uses only the first 155 characters in the description and the first 65 characters in the title. Pages with duplicate titles on the same web site are often not indexed, especially with Google.
- Google toolbar ranking: The little green bar that shows in browsers fitted with Google’s Page Rank tool to indicate a web pages Google page rank is NOT important to Google, or the other major search engines. The page rank of a page is no longer a significant factor in ranking for a particular search term. Page rank can however be important in determining how often your pages get visited by Google.
Search engines are of course interested in more factors than presented here. These factors have been established through our own experience and the research of others in the search engine community to be among the most important.
In the sequel article to this one are the factors that are of most interest to people visiting a web site. These influencing factors include visitor first impressions, appearance, site and page navigation, clarity of message, the offer experience and many more.
For people visiting a web site the importance of certain factors has very much more to do with human behaviour and perception. Therefore web site optimization for people imposes an entirely different set of requirements on the design or redesign of a web site than those needed for search engines.
Try our FREE website optimization evaluation to see what a search engine makes of your site.
About the Author: Tony Simpson writes frequently on web design and web page optimisation and provides a range of website optimization services designed to increase site revenue.
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